


And Ever After

by Entity_Sylvir



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Genre: Elope to Florence, Happy Ending, M/M, Outside POV (for the end), Post Red Dragon, Post Silence of the Lambs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 13:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1430686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Entity_Sylvir/pseuds/Entity_Sylvir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal finds Will after his escape, and they finish off their story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Ever After

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [故事的最后](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2008659) by [zivan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zivan/pseuds/zivan)



> This story started off mainly because I wanted to write something based off [this](http://nakedwarriors.tumblr.com/post/37412699071/brad-pitt-and-rose-byrne-in-troy) scene from Troy. It progressed because I love running away stories and wanted to try my hand at my own.
> 
> Set in a somewhat vague blend of book and show canon, deviating after Silence of the Lambs.

_"One thing bothered him a little: the way he felt when Crawford turned from the telephone in Chicago and said, “It's Gateway.” Possibly that was the most intense and savage joy that had ever burst in him. It was unsettling to know that the happiest moment of his life had come then, in that stuffy jury room in the city of Chicago."_

\- Will Graham on solving the Red Dragon case (Thomas Harris, 1981)

 

It's three weeks after news breaks of the escape that he hears footsteps behind him as he's brushing his teeth. And he's spent so many moments in those three weeks seeing the past in the shadows and ghosts in ever stranger he passes that he doesn't even flinch when he looks up to see that old familiar face in the mirror, putting down his toothbrush and rinsing out his mouth unhurriedly before he turns.

"Good evening, Doctor Lecter."

Hannibal's gaze doesn't find his but settles a little lower, on the mass of scar tissue that makes up Will's cheek. Will can study his eyes without connection, still as ordinary as ever, opening no windows to the soul of the monster he'd recognised too late.

"Are you going to kill me?"

Hannibal inclines his head. "Would you try to stop me?"

Will pushes past him, wiping his mouth on the hanging towel then walking out into his bedroom. He sleeps on the second floor now, of the far too large house the compensation money had gotten him. Mainly so he can use the walk-in closet as a liquor cabinet.

"Why bother? Knowing my luck you'll fail, again, and I'll still be stuck here."

He sits down on the edge of his bed and picks up the bottle of cheap scotch that he keeps on the ground beside it, taking a drink straight from the neck. Hannibal follows him, a frown creasing his face that looks to be more emotion than he's shown in a long time.

"Oh, Will," he says softly. "What have they done to you?"

Will takes another drink and barks out a laugh, sharp and ugly. "They, Hannibal?"

Hannibal steps up before him, reaching over to turn on the dusty bedside lamp. "You shouldn't do this."

"Why, because I'm worth more?"

He takes the bottle from Will's lax grip, their fingers brushing just barely. "Always."

Will laughs again, hollow and blank. "Why are you here?" he says finally, almost in a whisper.

He doesn't sky away when Hannibal sits down on the bed, close enough that their knees graze. "I was hoping you would be able to accommodate an old friend for a night."

"I could call the police."

"But you won't. You don't trust law enforcement anymore."

"Shut up." Will stands abruptly, stepping away with his back to the other man. "Don't pretend you know me."

He hears the mattress shift behind as Hannibal stands too. His voice is low when he speaks again. "Yet of everyone, I may very well have come the closest."

Will doesn't reply. The room is lit only by the slanting rectangle of light streaming from the bathroom, which he wordlessly walks over to turn out. There are no streetlights that can be seen from the window, no cars passing out front or neighbouring livelihoods until far further down the dusty track that can't quite be called a road. He has his solitude, still, and sometimes if he tries hard enough he can pretend that his little bubble of stillness is exempt from the rules of the rest of the world, free from the shadow of the past and the promise of the future where only the present must be endured in a spinning fog of depressants and grey walls.

Without turning around says, "There's a guest room downstairs."

 

* * *

 

The clock on his bedside blinks just after 3 a.m. when the sleeping pills where off and Will's eyes fall open. The room is that shade of night just under black that he knows so well, letting through only the looming shadows of a few bulky shapes. He almost feels it should be blacker, as if something ought to have leaked out from the darkness that sleeps in the house with him tonight.

He stands without a creak in the boards below him, chilly night air prickling up the skin below his short sleeves. The stairs are silent under his feet as he walks the route that he's made enough times with a whirling vision or pounding head that he no longer needs the light. Smooth wood gives way to the carpet of the hallway, then the tiles of the kitchen. The knife makes a tiny snick when it's pulled from the block.

The guest room is named as a label only, the house having never had an occupant other than its owner. Hannibal lies on the bare spare mattress in the middle of the floor, wrapped in a too-small blanket he had taken from the living room couch. Will takes a moment to consider the man, the effect of the passing years and the bind of the bars.

Hannibal's greying hair is shorter than it used to be kept, cut messily and unevenly. He wears a set of plain, loose, deliberately ill-fitting shirt and pants that Will couldn't have imagined on him once upon a time, He hasn't quite lost or gained weight, but the prison diet has reshaped him from the old comfortable leanness of fitness coupled with indulgence to something more pedestrian for his age. 

They say that some people look younger in their sleep, or less troubled, but Hannibal just looks blank. So blank, in fact, that he merely reflects back your own mind. Now, Will sees that resting face as the wax mask that's sealed over to hide a hideous mistake—lifetimes ago, looking over at the pillow beside his own, he would have called it a marble sculptor's masterpiece. But those impeccable features themselves have, really, never shifted.

Still human, Will thinks as he pushes away the remembered echo of fevered dreams of antlers and inky black skin. He steps forward and kneels down on the rough carpet to the left of the softly rising and falling chest, the long line of exposed neck. Still mortal.

The blade of his knife glints in the narrow shaft of moonlight seeping through the window as he lowers it against Hannibal's throat. No one cares to notice Will's house, no one knows who he hosts tonight. No one will bother to investigate too deeply when they find the body of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, convicted mass murderer.

"Do it."

The voice makes him startle, but not jump. Hannibal's eyes blink open.

"Nothing is easier."

Will's right arm remains still where his fingers clutch the smooth handle, frozen, perfectly solid. It feels heavy in his hand. "You'll kill more people if I don't," he whispers.

"Yes." Hannibal slowly begins to move, long fingers stroking around Will's wrist as his other hand reaches out. "But then, you won't."

Abruptly Will finds himself pulled down. An arm wraps around his shoulder to grip at his back, pressing him against Hannibal's chest then rolling them both so that his back is pressed against the mattress with the other man above him, above his knife. He inhales but doesn't gasp, pressing upwards so that the blade digs into the soft skin of Hannibal's neck, just short of drawing blood. "And here I thought you'd be singing," he says, voice grinding harsher. "Knowing that you've finally succeeded to driving me here."

Hannibal's hands are still moving, one now tangling itself in Will's unkempt hair and the other trailing down his side. "Once, yes, I had wished to place you beside me," Hannibal says quietly. "And yet, as you have proved so many times over that you are the steel that pushes back and not my clay to knead, I see you better for where you stand before me. You are my balance, Will, my negative. You found the good in the world where I no longer could, despite everything you've seen. I implore that you never let that change."

"No." Will's eyes harden. "Don't you talk now as if you care."

"I have always cared." Hannibal's voice drops, deep and rough. "You are too precious to hide away."

There's another bark of that humourless laughter. "And of course, who do you think I'm hiding from?"

"I know," Hannibal replies simply, "but do you? It's not me, Will, it's yourself. Your mind is what you've been running from, what you drink to turn off. Because that's what drove you back for Dolarhyde's case, back to see me, and what your wife couldn't accept."

Will makes a sound that's almost a growl and presses harder again, a thin line of red pooling by the polished silver. Instead of moving back, Hannibal leans further in, pushing the stalemate until, gradually, Will pulls back just the fractions to follow him. "Tell me," Hannibal continues, "isn't the time you feel the most alive when you are using that brilliant perception of yours, unravelling threads and diving through the tangle of another's thoughts?" He's close enough now that Will can feel the warm puffs of air as he speaks. "If you have lost faith in the FBI, then let us find some other way to match your mind," he says, words low and intimate, caressing.

Then Hannibal kisses him, and Will's back in that luxurious bed in Baltimore, pressed laughingly against the table in Hannibal's office, wrapped in a strong arms and a stolen moment in Quantico. He gasps, mouth unintentionally falling open, free hand moving without his permission to wrap around the broad shoulders. Whatever is knotting in this thoughts, his body remembers the comforting press of that solid form, the quiet happiness of that warm embrace. It's been so long since anyone touched him, not since Molly, and in that second everything boils down to the simple pleasure of skin on skin and nothing else seems important.

The dull thud of the knife against the floor is barely heard in the chorus of their joint breaths.

 

* * *

 

Will wakes the next morning with a head clear of hangover for the first time in longer than he would care to recall. He stands slowly, gathering the blanket around himself as he makes his way to the kitchen. The fabric is coarse against his bare skin.

Hannibal is making breakfast, hair loose and movements as fluid as the predator on the hunt that he is. He smiles when Will enters, sincere but with just a little too much teeth to be entirely pure, sweetness laced with the tang of hidden danger. Something stashed and stowed away stirs in Will, and he grins back.

"Take me away from here," he says as he steps forward into the den of the spider, and feels _alive_.

 

* * *  
* * *  
* * *

 

The Italian sun is warm as it floats down on the bustling city, air light and ringing with the church bells tolling 5pm. Jack Crawford sits at the small outside table of an ice-cream parlour as the employees begin to close up, looking out over the commuters finishing their days of work and contemplating the odd feeling of no longer has having any of his own. He stands when the busboy comes to pack away his chair and turns out to face the street.

It's been a month since his forced retirement, two weeks since he was suggested by his old employers to take a holiday to help adjust. If he's honest with himself he can see that both have been a long time in coming, his grasp of things at work had frayed noticeably in the two years following Former Agent Graham's disappearance and he hadn't had taken a proper break since his wife's death. So now he's back, where he met his Bella, to the country he'll forever remember by the joy of that first spark of love.

He begins to stroll back to his hotel, his pace leisurely as he weaves between the passers-by. There's a grand old building on the opposite site of the road and his eyes linger on the sweeping architecture as he walks, until his gaze is interrupted as a very expensive-looking car pulls up and parks beside it. A man gets out from the passenger side with his back to the road, Jack noting his simple clothes which seem very out of place compared to the vehicle he'd been travelling in. He watches idly as the man shuts the door and turns around, stopping Jack dead.

His skin is tanned, hair dyed blonde and shorn close to his head so that little of the old familiar curls can be seen, but the jagged lines that divide his cheek are unmistakable. Confused pedestrians buffer around Jack as he stares openly, frozen in the centre of the footpath. Two years ago he called suicide with failure bitter on his tongue and yet now he blinks, blinks twice, and forgets to breathe as he finds himself looking into Will Graham's face.

He remembers again in a sharp inhale when the driver's door opens, and Hannibal Lecter steps out.

He's changed too, dark glasses covering his eyes and grown-out hair pulled back into a long ponytail. He shuts his own door and locks the car while Will walks around to stand by his side and says a few words. They stand just a little too close together.

Then Will turns and looks out across the road, and catches Jack's eyes. There's a second of frozen surprise before recognition dawns, and an endless moment as their gazes lock. Jack wonders what the man will do, scream, run, or signal for help. His mind races with possibilities, of pasts and histories, and also of futures.

But instead, Will smiles.

It lights up his face, bronzed with the sun and free of that resigned blankness he'd taken up when Molly had filed for divorce. He looks good, much better than when Jack had last dropped in and found him near emaciated and reeking of alcohol. It's been a long time since Jack's seen Will smile. If he had to pick one word, he'd say it makes him look free.

And a second later Will turns away again, without a cry or a care. Jack watches as he steps closer, leaning in and letting Hannibal slip an arm around his waist. From the back they could be any couple, walking together through the Florence streets, arm in arm and life in life. Within a few more moments they're lost in the crowd.

Slowly, Jack unsticks himself from the cement. He isn't entirely sure what he's borne witness to today, but it strikes something unexpected in him. Something that feels strangely like hope.

Hannibal Lecter is a monster, of that Jack has no doubt. And yet, just maybe with the depths that his unique perception can reach, Will has managed to find some long-buried remnant of humanity. One could declare that he deserves better than a life running in a shadow, though while the alternative is rotting away with his solitude and his bottles that may not quite be true.

Jack can't and never will condone, but perhaps what Will deserves is a little bending of the black and white. If there is a way, after all he's been through, all he's been put through, perhaps he deserves to find his measure of happiness however it comes and whatever has to be done to get there.

Tomorrow, if Jack does his research he'll find Dr. Fell who works at the local courthouse, and his well-known vegetarian partner William Africanus who stands as one of the most generous supporters of the local charities and whose name draws half a smile to Jack's lips. He'll be able to dig up the files of disappeared drug dealers and pimps whom no one misses or cares to look for, and the address of their three-storey house in the suburbs with a grassy yard big enough for their five dogs. He can investigate, if he decides to, tomorrow.

But today, he walks away, and he leaves them be. And tonight he'll dream of cold steel bars and the Chesapeake Ripper's victims, of Bella's laugh and Will Graham smiling in the sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> Will's not entirely inconspicuous alias is named obviously after Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who defeated Hannibal. I thought it was appropriate.
> 
> Feel free to message, poke, and/or threaten to eat me over at my [tumblr](http://tumbleweedforyou.tumblr.com).


End file.
